Iconic filmmaker Mrinal Sen dead
It’s almost fitting that film critic and director Khalid Mohamed in the coming issue of WKND magazine (to be published this Friday, 4 January) writes about Mrinal Sen as being a pioneer. Bhuvan Shome, often hailed as kickstarting the Indian New Wave genre, was the Bengali director’s first Hindi film, and ushered in the dawn of “parallel cinema” in Hindi movies — the language that has the most pan-Indian currency (the other great Bengali director, Satyajit Ray — with whom Sen was often compared to in his home state of West Bengal — went on to make his first Hindi movie Shatranj Ke
Khiladi much later, in 1977). Sen — much more than Ray — was unabashedly political, espousing a Marxist, middle-class ideology. Most of his work was in Bengali but he had a sizeable body of work in Hindi, making him the true crossover director in India. He came down heavily on exploitation, and lay bare the frailties of the human condition: consider Mrigayaa (1976), Mithun Chakraborty’s debut, set in the 1920s, where there’s a face-off between the tribals and the ruling elite (both British and Indian) — and you’ll know how he was the ultimate leveller. A big believer in non-escapist cinema (he hated what Bollywood stood for), he never pulled his punches, yet showcased hopes and aspirations in the most lyrical manner possible.
In an old interview to Gary Crowdus for Cineaste, Sen said, “Most Indian films are bad, and discriminating spectators just dismiss them. But starting with Interview referring to his 1971 film, where a middle class man has to appear for a job interview in a ‘Western suit’, but whose entire day goes haywire because of trade union protests and later films, those viewers who didn’t like my films became angry, saying, ‘These are anti-social films.’ I take such comments as compliments, because they lead me to believe that perhaps I have been able to make my points well enough.”
Personally, my reluctant induction into “art cinema” in the 1980s happened thanks mostly to Sen. I was a sucker for garish Bollywood offerings, and yet the re-runs of the Bengali film Ek Din
Pratidin (which literally translates into ‘one day, every day’, referring to ‘daily routine’) on television over weekends was something I never failed to miss. There was something terribly gripping in the story about a young working woman who doesn’t return home from work one evening, leading the entire family to go into a tizzy with speculations and apprehensions. Later, Sen would make the Hindi language Ek Din Achanak (translating into ‘one day, suddenly), starring Dr Shriram Lagoo, Shabana Azmi and Aparna Sen, about a retired professor’s disappearance one morning for no good reason — another elegiac film that left me in thraldom.
I watched a smattering of Sen’s movies through the 80s and 90s — Akaler Sandhane (In Search of Famine), Chalchitra
(The Kaleidoscope), Kharij (The Case Is Closed), the wonderful
Khandhar (The Ruins) etc — but the last one I watched was his second-last: Antareen, based on a story by Saadat Hasan Manto, on a woman trapped in a loveless marriage, starring Dimple Kapadia in her first — and only — role in Bengali.
Sometime in 2000, I’d called the Mrinal Sen residence (in Calcutta) for a quote on what the new millennium would herald for Indian cinema. I remember Sen picked up the phone himself, on second ring; his diction was clear and refined; his clarity was spot on, the man didn’t believe in beating about the bush. He didn’t have the kindest things to say about Indian cinema’s future, but what remained with me was, “We need to realise everything cannot be a
tamasha [spectacle]… somewhere, we need to have a heart.”